Monday, June 02, 2008

Playing with SlickEdit

Being a tool geek I couldn't resist installing it and fooling around a bit. I've not spent a whole lot of time with the tools, but have already found some cool bits. The window below shows a cool documentation preview in MSDN style, a nice compliment to what I get from ReSharper's Ctrl-Q. There's also a nice regex evaluator which can generate code for you to paste in as needed.

The "Quick Profiling" bits require you to get some trace handling in your code, so I'm not sure how far I'll go with that, but it may be an interesting thing to experiment around with.

There's also a very nice comparison tool as part of the Versioning Toolbox. There's some interesting visual sugar for version graphs, history, and visualizations. The graphs are pretty cool, and the list of providers is very competent: SVN, CVS, TFS 2005/2008, and VSS (barf).

Perhaps one of the best widgets in the versioning toolbox is the DIFFzilla window:

This is nearly as good as my favorite comparison tool Beyond Compare 2. Love that directory compare feature, and you can quickly get file comparisons by double-clicking a set of the files in this window.

Overall I like what I see so far. While I've got access to other tools which fit a lot of these needs, it's really nice to have all this wrapped inside Visual Studio.

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About Me

I'm the owner/principal of Guidepost Systems. I help lots of great folks figure out what works and what doesn't in the world of delivering quality software -- something I'm very passionate about. I'm also a Father trying to remain sane while trying to build great software, herd my kids around, fix school lunches and handle the yardwork. (And roast great coffee!)